Dave Hone

But is it fair to say that they were mostly dumb?

I don't think so.

Because I think that comes down to, A, that bit of kind of classic, almost Victorian speciesisms.

And you get these insane hypotheses like dinosaurs as a species or as a lineage became senile, so they forgot to breed.

That was literally a suggested idea.

Uh, you know, the mammals ate their eggs and all of this kind of stuff, you know, dinosaurs only lived alongside mammals for a hundred million years.

It'd be weird if they all went extinct at the same time because suddenly egg eating evolved.

Um, you know, you, you've got problems like this.

Um,

But also, again, that general speciesism, which even goes back to stuff like Linnaeus and his taxonomic ranks, and even stuff like Aristotle.

You've got humans are superior in some way, and we're superior to the other mammals.

And of course, mammals are closest to us, so they must be quite good.

And then they've got to be better than lizards, and then lizards have to be better than frogs, and frogs have to be better than fish.

So that gets you into the, well, reptiles must be stupid.

And they're not.

I mean, that's been hypothesized plenty of times.

Dale Russell, a Canadian paleontologist, the famous guy, came up with this human-like truodontid that was done for a TV documentary.

I think the one that Christopher Reeve narrated, that I think is a remake, but I've seen the original that Dale had made for his TV show, and it's still...

It's sitting in the collections of the National Museum of Nature in Ottawa for Canada.

It's really, really cool.